Indian students among winners of NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program

Indian students secured two winning positions among the five that were selected for NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program. Sandeep Agrawal, from Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India who is a student of Duke University and Soham Uday Mehta, from Nagpur, India who studies at the University of California, Berkeley are two of the five Ph.D students who won.

The other three winners are Benjamin Eckart, from Clarksville, TN who is a student at Carnegie Mellon University, Andrew Maimone, from Warsaw, NY, who is studying at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Jin Wang, from Ningbo, China who is studying at the Georgia Institute of Technology

The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program awards $25,000 to Ph.D. students involved in GPU computing research. The aim is to support graduate students doing outstanding GPU-based work by offering a financial incentive and technical support.

"NVIDIA has a long-standing commitment to supporting outstanding academic research, because we know it fuels innovation," said Bill Dally chief scientist and senior vice president of research. "We've invested millions of dollars in support of ground-breaking research in science, engineering and medicine. We're delighted to support the work of these exceptional graduate students, whose efforts will help define the future of computing."

Sandeep Agrawal's project was on web service workloads like document search, image search and dynamic web pages exhibit a high degree of similarity among requests, and this makes them a good fit for warp scheduling on modern GPUs. Sandeep's research aims to design future server platforms using data parallel hardware to achieve maximal throughput per Watt while keeping latency under tolerable bounds.

Soham Uday Mehta's research project focused on using signal processing ideas like frequency analysis to understand the light fields in rendering, and develop faster algorithms for rendering photo-realistic images. Through the use of adaptive sampling and filtering on the GPU, his algorithm can produce accurate images with depth of field and area light direct and illumination at least 30x faster.

The Graduate Fellowship award winners were selected from more than a hundred applicants in 21 countries. Their projects involve a variety of technical challenges, including computer architecture, programming models, character animation, computer graphics, and computational methods for simulating chemical events.